The Way We Never Met: The Circle, Broken
by Athenae1
Summary: Fourth in a series of Mal AUs. Mal chooses the other ship and meets a mercenary. Character death.


The Way We Never Met: The Circle, Broken

Author: Athenae

Rating: PG-13, bad words and some sex. Character death.

Summary: Fourth in a series of Mal AUs. Mal chooses the other ship and meets a mercenary.

Spoilers: Out of Gas

Dislaimers: Mal, Serenity, the other ship, the crew and the concept for Firefly are not mine. Evangeline is, but if you want her, you can have her.

Author's notes: The old spiritual from the title makes its appearance at the end. Evangeline was an invention in the first "Never Met" story, "Marseillaise." This is so very indebted to Vehemently's "Cradle Elbows Wide," which I love more every time I read it, and Erla at Oak Mill Bakery, who is my model for Evangeline.

Evangeline came back to him for three nights after he lost her, came back whole, the parts of her blown away by Alliance ammo sewed back in place so carefully he almost didn't see the stitches.

She whispered and sang over him, tending his scars. She lay down beside him the way she'd done in the early days of the war, when they were both young enlisteds who believed they'd already won. Before the generals cut and run back to their safehouses, before HQ stopped transmitting, before they ran out of bullets. Before Serenity Valley.

During training camp she started sleeping in his bunk primarily to keep warm; it was midwinter on Andronicus and the ground was just cold enough to chill the mud you slept in, not enough to freeze it so you could walk without sinking up to your knees. He was startled when she slipped beneath his blanket, little blond skinny five feet of girl who'd smiled at him yesterday during the grenade assembly drill.

He found out she spoke Polish because she talked when she dreamed.

"Dead language," he teased her the next morning, and she silenced him with her mouth. They had coffee in camp then, and she tasted of it, dark and bitter. He asked that they be transferred together to their next assignment, after the war. Which they were sure would be over in a month, so superior and brave were their forces.

Now he's about to die, and he expected her to come for him, lying here trussed like cattle, in the hold of this junkheap vessel, waiting for the mercenaries to lay him out.

Maybe he shouldn't have named the ship after her. Maybe it frightened her away.

"Take good care of her and she'll be with you the rest of your life," the salesman had said, and he didn't think twice, forking over his hard-earned cash for the towering, shiny thing, showing it to Zoe like he'd given birth to it himself. They picked up crew fast; everybody wanted to work on the newest, fastest, best ship off Persephone. It was so new the engines hadn't even been tested, and it turned out that was the problem.

"You won't even need a mechanic," the salesman said, rubbing his hands together like Mal's wallet was a tasty roast on a spit. Good thing, too, because Bester was worse than useless, and the silly flit he brought on board to sport with wasn't much help, either. Pretty thing, but dumber than a box of hair.

Still, Evangeline's namesake ran fine for the first year, and they did enough business to keep up with the payments, until the Reavers came.

"She's faster than Reaver ships, even," the salesman had boasted, and Wash threw everything Evangeline had at them, pushing her so hard the internal grav drives couldn't keep up, and everybody had to strap down so they wouldn't fly off into the walls or the cieling.

Which was the least of their problems when they outran the Reavers. Bester's girl noticed the smell first, but pretty soon smoke filled the hold, and they had to wear gas masks to breathe. Was Zoe, convinced him to set down first place they could find. When Bester went out to find parts and never came back, Mal began to understand just what kind of trouble they'd wandered into.

The moon was bare and dark, sunlight only four hours a day according to the Cortex. The ship's lights went next, sucking the batteries dry and making it impossible to see. Wash made jokes about fixing a spaceship by candlelight that only Zoe laughed at. And nobody saw the thieves until the doors slammed shut.

The tape dug at Mal's mouth. He'd promised the ship and his own worthless self if they let his crew go, and he tried not to think what Zoe and Wash and Bester's Katie or Kitty Something would do on this pitch-black rock from hell besides end up deader than he was about to be.

"Findin' everything to yer likin'?"

The voice came from behind him, the man who'd put a big polished gun to his face and said he'd blow Mal's toes off one by one, his aim was that good, unless all these gorram people got off the ship right the hell now.

Mal wriggled around until he was facing the big, shorn-headed bandit. He couldn't speak through the gag, but he bared his teeth, and with a wolflike smile the man leaned down and pulled the strip of plastic away from his face.

"How's that? Better?"

If he could lift his head, Mal thought, he'd spit in his face. The man had speared one of their precious green apples from Wash's private stores and was tearing into it with his teeth like a fresh kill.

"The hell you want with me?" Mal's tongue felt furry, thick. He licked raw, dry lips, trying to get his bearings. The cargo hold spun a bit.

"Don' give a damn 'bout you," the man said, chewing thoughtfully. "Want yer ship. Figure I keep you tied up here long enough, hit you hard enough you'll give me the access codes.

"Then I'll kill you, of course. Only thing that'll be different if you talk fast is that the killin' will be quick.

"She's a sexy little speeder, ain't she?" He spit out an apple seed that landed, wet and sticky, at Mal's bound feet. "What's 'er name?"

Mal looked up at him, hatred burning hot behind his eyes. "What's yours?"

"Cobb," the man said, spitting again, bits of green skin sticking to his shrubby beard. "Now what's —" he traced a thin line of blood across Mal's throat "her—" and dug the knife a little deeper just where his neck joined the shoulder "name?"

The blood was hot and sticky, running down his back. "Her name is Evangeline."

Her specialty was sabotage.

She could slither behind the enemy's lines like a garter snake in a clover patch and steal their cartridges, slipping the magazines right out of the purplebellies' rifles while they napped on border duty. She came back triumphant one night, her face darkened with lampblack, teeth flashing white as she told him how she'd taken one coil each from every Alliance transport hover she could find, and that nobody was getting out of camp for a while.

She'd found the Alliance's secret stash and she was going back out tomorrow. The ammo dump was just over Cassius Hill, she said that morning. Back inside an hour; he wouldn't even know she was gone.

The explosion was like a nova.

It was glorious, Zoe told him when she found him in the back corner of his — their — tent, shivering and shaking his head. It was like comets hit each other. She made a flash they'll see for miles. She made it mean something.

Reggie and Bolis brought her back to him, at great risk to their own wasted lives, brought back the pieces of his girl laid out as best they could on Reggie's coat that they carried between them like a canopy all the way. Mal screamed at them for ten minutes about how stupid that was, slowing themselves down with some hunks of meat that weren't anything any more. He couldn't even bury her because there wasn't room; browncoats were dying six a day at that point. So Reggie'd ruined a badly needed coat for nothing.

But on her finger was a ring of silver and he slipped it off before he wrapped her up and placed her with the others, on the Pile. There was a verse inside the ring, but it was in Polish, and no one in the camp could translate.

The next three nights he woke to her flitting gaze and the brush of her hair as she leaned across his chest. In the dim light of the campfires he almost didn't see the tiny, perfect stitches that joined the two halves of her face again. He knew it for a nightmare, but closed his eyes to it anyway, running his fingers over the seams and scoring on her body, a tactile prayer of thanks for this small relief.

The fourth night Zoe came to him instead, saying she'd heard him talking, and what started out in comfort turned to greedy grasping of hands and clothes and they worked in each other until exhaustion. He slept without visitation that night, but they never did it again, and you couldn't have paid them to talk about it.

As the mercenary's boot connected with his ribs, Mal closed his eyes.

The first month on their own in the black was a wonderment. Mal sat up all the long first night, watching the stars go by. Zoe cooked — Zoe cooking, he nearly fell over in shock — and sang while she did it, an old old chanty one of the ranch hands used to sing around the fire. Eventually, Bester joined in, and singing was something he was actually good at. Evangeline hummed beneath them, a bass to their treble voices.

He let out a gasp as Cobb's fist drove into the soft place beneath his rib cage, pushing his lungs outward.

Every night was like that, their small band alone in the 'verse, no Alliance ships, no jobs except the ones they chose. They were free.

His face was tight with the swelling from where Cobb punched him in the eye. He couldn't move his lips anymore; must have broken a cheekbone or some such.

That day in the junkyard, looking up at her, Mal had known: she would be the life he would have wanted for his girl, the newest and best and shiniest of everything. He'd walked by a dozen piles of worthless, rusted junk, old Arachnid transports and Fireflies, hulks that wouldn't get them to the other side of Persephone, let alone across the 'verse. It was destiny, Mal and Evangeline.

It always had been.

He barely heard himself whispering the sequence of numbers that would open her up and let her fly away.

As the muzzle pressed close against his temple, he closed his eyes. And in his ears was not Cobb's harsh breathing, but the sweetness of another voice.

"I knew," he whispered. "I knew you'd come."

_We sang the songs of childhood _

_Hymns of faith that made us strong _

_Ones that Mother Maybelle taught us _

Hear the angels sing along 

_Will the circle be unbroken _

_by and by, Lord, by and by _

_There's a better home a-waiting _

_in the sky, Lord, in the sky_


End file.
